The characters on the divider say ぐーぐる”(Google)
but look like steam coming out of a bath."

It’s been three weeks since I’ve started my internship at Google and it’s already a whirlwind of endless activity - every day gives me an opportunity to discover something new about what it means to be an Associate Product Manager (APM) at Google and what it’s like to work in the Tokyo office.

I often get the question- what does an APM intern do? Over the past several weeks I’ve come to learn that it means being a particularly ardent and persistent advocate of a particular product or feature. This requires also knowing a lot about the product in order to be able to make the right kinds of decisions about what features to launch and what to shelve. It also means coordinating and facilitating dialogue about what other stakeholders in the product think - which often means doing Hangouts with people in Mountain View! I’m working on YouTube’s captions feature with Brad, who is my mentor and who has helped me familiarize myself with all things related to YouTube, captions and the awesome team here.

What’s particularly exciting about working on captions is that I’ve always championed the notion that we should have greater accessibility online. Google's mission is to “make the world's information universally accessible” so I truly feel like the work I'm doing is a direct impact on these efforts. Captions help people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing understand the dialog and audio cues within a video. YouTube already integrates great features that let speech recognition technology automatically generate captions, but there is a lot that Google can continue doing and improve! It’s really motivating to be part of that process.

There’s so much else that enlivens my work day at Google Tokyo, not merely the fact that I can see Tokyo Tower from my desk! I really enjoy hanging out with the other interns here and hearing about their own projects, and the first weekend after I started, a couple of us went to the Tsukiji fish market to see the tuna auctions. We had to wake up at 3 in the morning, but it was very much worth the trip. I also help coordinate efforts to send Googlers to the northern part of Japan to volunteer in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami from last year.

Fun Google Fact: One of the floors at the Google Tokyo office is designed to look like a Japanese public bath (onsen), complete with fabric dividers and a giant wall with a painting of Mount Fuji! There’s also a secret koi pond somewhere in the office!

The end of my first month at Google is rapidly approaching and yet it feels like I’ve just arrived. Now more than ever I feel like the old saying is true: time flies when you’re having fun! Until the end of August, I’ll be interning in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania at Google’s Bakery Square office. I’m already familiar with Pittsburgh because I’ve been a student at Carnegie Mellon University for the past few years; I love this city, and Google was my top choice company to intern with, so to say I’m excited to be here is an understatement.

I’m working with the SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) team this summer. SREs are responsible for making sure that Google’s infrastructure is running smoothly. That is, they make sure all of Google’s services -- things like Gmail, Ads, Search, and many internal services -- are running reliably and quickly. My project deals with managing data about internal services running on some of our servers. As a consequence, it’s a little difficult to talk about the specifics here, but over these first three and a half weeks I’ve been focusing on learning about the tools I’ll be using, working on the design for my project, and socializing with my team members and other Googlers.

One thing that has really stood out to me since beginning my internship is that everyone I’ve interacted with has been exceptionally friendly and helpful. Starting out in a new company is always a little nerve-wracking and overwhelming, especially when you have a lot to learn, but so many Googlers (even ones not on my team) have gone out of their way to assist me and make me feel welcomed.

Fun Google Fact: Nerf fights are an everyday occurrence in the office. When I arrived at my desk in Bakery Square on my first day, a welcoming crew gave me my Noogler (Google-ese for “new Googler”) balloon and a Nerf gun. My team provided me with a second Nerf gun -- and immediately used my balloon for target practice. A well-aimed dart is a playful way to catch the attention of someone across the hall or just to have a little fun!

Budding novelists, poets and philosophers: you’ve probably had moments when you wished you had one of the greats around to provide a bit of help with your coursework. You may have imagined Bill Shakespeare fixing the rhythm of your sonnet or Dickens adding some color to your plain prose. Now with our new ‘Docs Demo: Masters Edition’ you can experience collaboration with some of your (or at least you professor’s) favorite authors.

Try typing up part of an essay and see if Poe, Nietzsche and other literary greats can help whip your paper into shape.

You may already be familiar with some shortcuts for Google Search, like using the search box as a calculator or finding local movie showtimes by typing [movies] and your zip code. But there are many more tips, tricks and tactics you can use to find exactly what you’re looking for, when you most need it.

Today, we’ve opened registration for Power Searching with Google, a free, online, community-based course showcasing these techniques and how you can use them to solve everyday problems. Our course is aimed at empowering you to find what you need faster, no matter how you currently use search. For example, did you know that you can search for and read pages written in languages you’ve never even studied? Identify the location of a picture your friend took during his vacation a few months ago? How about finally identifying that green-covered book about gardening that you’ve been trying to track down for years? You can learn all this and more over six 50-minute classes.

Lessons will be released daily starting on July 10, 2012, and you can take them according to your own schedule during a two-week window, alongside a worldwide community. The lessons include interactive activities to practice new skills, and many opportunities to connect with others using Google tools such as Google Groups, Moderator and Google+, including Hangouts on Air, where world-renowned search experts will answer your questions on how search works. Googlers will also be on hand during the course period to help and answer your questions in case you get stuck.

Power Searching with Google blends the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) learning format pioneered by Stanford and MIT with our social and communication tools to create what we hope is a true community learning experience.

Visit the course homepage to learn more. By the end of this course, you'll know several new techniques that will make you a Google Power Searcher and help you find out information about whatever you can imagine—from how to prepare for a new family pet to where moss grows on Stonehenge or how to grow katniss in your garden. Sign up now!

It’s that time of year when Google offices around the globe seem to grow exponentially as interns join teams for a summer full of hard work, and of course, lots of fun. To give you an inside look into the life of a Google intern, we’re starting up the annual Diary of a Summer Intern blog series. Each intern will blog about his or her experiences throughout the summer and will take part in Hangouts On Air from the Google Students page on Google+.

Without further ado, here are the interns we’ll be featuring this summer:

Name: Jess Virdó
University: Carnegie Mellon University
Year: Entering my fifth (and final) undergraduate year in the fall
Major: Pursuing a BSc in Computer Science and a second BSc in Logic and Computation with a second major in Philosophy
Role: Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) intern
Office: Pittsburgh
Hobbies: Playing board games, cooking, and dyeing people's hair funny colors.
What I'm most looking forward to at Google: Nerf gun fights and delicious free food. Just kidding. I'm most looking forward to being surrounded by passionate, brilliant engineers and experiencing the company culture firsthand... and also Nerf gun fights and delicious free food.

Name: Franklin Ochieng
University: University of Nairobi
Year: 4th
Major: Bsc. Computer Science
Role: Software Engineering Intern, Africa Trainee Program
Team: Emerging Markets
Office: Zurich
Hobbies: Movies, music, basketball, computer games, hanging out with pals
What I’m most looking forward to at Google: Working in my team to come up with a highly useful application that I could see in future and feel proud about.

Name: Pablo Molinero
University: UC Berkeley - Haas School of Business
Year in school: Graduating in 2013
Major: MBA
Role: MBA Intern - Product Marketing Manager
Team: Mobile ads
Office: Mountain View
Hobbies: Playing with my son, gadgets, social volunteering, travelling, videogames, and soccer!
What I'm most looking forward to at Google: Learning as much as I can about Google's businesses (particularly mobile), enjoying the fun yet hard work culture, and working on complex problems in an ever-changing industry

Name: Rio Akasaka
University where you study: Stanford University
Year in school: Second-year Masters
Major: Computer Science
Role: Associate Product Manager (APM) Intern
Team: YouTube
Office: Tokyo
A hobby of yours: I love to bike and travel. My favorite bike is a Cannondale R400 :)
What you're most looking forward to at Google: It's a bit cliche, but the things I really look forward to most is meeting and finding out about people working on all of Google's exciting projects.

Name: Luke Fernandez
University: The University of Texas-- Austin
Year in School: Rising Senior
Major: Finance; Film
Role: BOLD Intern
Team/Project You're Working On: YouTube - Interactive Solutions
Office: San Bruno
A Hobby of Yours: Live Music, Traveling, Film, Disc Golf
What You're most looking forward to at Google: Working with like-minded individuals to help grow and optimize YouTube campaigns, as well as growing as an individual and professional.

Are you a Computer Science PhD student interested in a career at Google? We have a Hangout on Air just for you. Come learn more about opportunities for PhDs in non-traditional research roles at Google. Did you know that we have a variety of technical roles that need a substantial background in algorithms, maths, systems, networking, compiler technology, computer vision or artificial intelligence?

We’re having a Hangout on Air with Googlers with PhDs working in Europe in software engineering roles tomorrow, Tuesday, June 19 at 17:30 CEST (find your local time here). If you have questions, please submit them on our Moderator page or by making a public post on Google+ and including the hashtag #GooglePhD.

A doctoral degree is arguably the ultimate end goal of a modern education. But with the research opportunities now available in industry and the lure of the start-up, why do students pursue this advanced academic achievement? For many, it's the opportunity to explore a fascinating area in great depth. Computer Science is still a young, dynamic field where an innovative researcher might hit on something that can truly change the world.

Google’s global fellowship program was created to support those willing to take on this noble endeavor. This year, the fourth year of the program, we welcome two new regions and are delighted to be supporting 40 students’ graduate studies in Australia, Canada, China, Europe, India, and the United States. You can click here to see a list of all of our Google Fellowship recipients.

PhD students have a unique experience. They are intently focused on a specialized area of study, with a goal of producing tangible results in a defined timeframe. The process requires sophisticated knowledge of the domain, expert planning and problem-solving skills, and the ability to communicate their work and results through publications, conferences and ultimately, in authoring a book. These are highly transferable skills of great value, no matter what path the student chooses after graduate school.

Congratulations to our fellows; we applaud you on your chosen path and look forward to the accomplishments to come.

What do you get when you combine Googlers, technical students, trivia, puzzles, Legos, coding problems and a healthy dose of competition? None other than Google Games.

Google Games Chicago

Google Games brings students from all over the U.S. to local Google offices and nearby universities for a bit of Googley culture and fun. This year, Google Games took place in our Seattle, Chicago, Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Cambridge, Mountain View, and Washington DC office, and also on the University of Michigan campus, bringing together over 900 students from 26 universities.

Google Games 2012 was video game themed and in true video game fashion, teams completed tasks to earn stars. The day began with trivia questions ranging from “National Metric Day falls on this date each year,”1 and “This animal is the mascot of the Go programming language.”2 After students completed the trivia, they tackled six puzzles based on our engineers’ favorite video games. During lunch, students got a chance to mingle with other students and Googlers, and also check out some of the office space. To combat the infamous after lunch food coma, we challenged teams to build the largest bridge (2*length+height) with a pound of random Lego bricks. Of course, things got a little tense when teams finished building and had to wait patiently as Googlers walked around to measure bridges, being careful not to knock anything over. We wrapped up the day with a few tough coding challenges, created with the help of our Code Jam engineers.

Google Games Cambridge

At the end of the day, stars were tallied and each location crowned a Google Games winning team. Congratulations to this year’s victors:

Seattle - Team Name (UW)

University of Michigan - Smash the Stack

Atlanta - Trashball Champions (Georgia Tech)

Chicago - Infinite Loop (UIUC)

New York - Blogorithms (Princeton)

Los Angeles - Team Beavers (Caltech)

Cambridge - Kirkland G-21 (Harvard)

Pittsburgh - Mystery Inc. (CMU)

Mountain View - 4↑↑3 (UC Berkeley)

Washington DC - Terps (UMD)

Take a look at more photos from this year's competition, and don't forget to add Google Students to your circles on Google+ to learn more about next year’s competition.

Improving computer science education in EMEA is an important goal for Google, and our impact starts long before a university CS degree.

Through the Google EMEA Computer Science 4 High School (CS4HS) Program, we provide funding to 49 university led CS education projects across 33 countries in the region. CS4HS aims to scale CS education knowledge from universities throughout EMEA, by encouraging them to work in tandem with local high schools and teachers. These projects educate and inspire the next generation of computer scientists, through teacher training workshops and curriculum development projects.

2011 was a great year for CS4HS. Workshops run by Strathmore University in Nairobi became a nation-wide training program for teachers in Kenya and we once again supported Queen Mary University's curriculum development materials, CS4FN.

CS4HS workshop at Vilnius University, Lithuania

We worked with universities to develop their programs further and encourage new universities to apply and in 2012, CS4HS has doubled in size and grown in its regional reach, contributing $420,000 worth of community funding this year. Growth regions include Sub Saharan Africa, the Middle East and Northern Africa, and Eastern Europe where 22 of our projects will run in 2012.

These projects collectively impact thousands of teachers and their students and we're very excited to see CS4HS continue to grow. Watch this space for profiles of some of the great projects running this year!

Today we’re featuring one of our roles within software engineering: the Site Reliability Engineer, or SRE. We sat down with Andrew Widdowson, who joined Google in 2007, to give you an inside look into the role. If you’re interested in applying for a Site Reliability Engineer position, please apply for our general Software Engineer position, then indicate in your resume objective line that you’re interested in the SRE role.

Andrew in the lobby of the Google Australia office
Photo credit: Jurij Smakov

Tell us about your path to Google.Andrew Widdowson: I grew up in Oley, PA., a small town that has more cows than people. I attended Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, majored in computer science, minored in physics, and completed a Fifth Year Scholars Program in four years. After school, I spent two years in Boston as a research-oriented software engineer at Bose developing a music recommendation service. I moved to the Bay Area to join Google in 2007.

How do you define the term “Google Site Reliability Engineer”?AW: SREs at Google are the software engineers responsible for ensuring that all of Google’s services are super reliable and super fast, all of the time.

Wait, did you say “software engineer”?AW: Yes! Many people think that SRE is just a candy-coated term for "operations.” It's not—we're doing planet-scale engineering here, and that requires solid engineering principles and people. SREs typically start out as rock star software engineers interested in becoming rock star systems engineers, or vice versa. And unlike most operations groups, SREs are a volunteer army - they are free to transfer to other compatible software engineering teams at any time if they don’t like the work or the environment.

OK, what are SREs actually like?AW: To use an analogy, we’re not the actors on stage; we’re the folks behind the scenes wearing the headsets and making sure everything is running smoothly. Alternatively, our work is like being a part of the world’s most intense pit crew. We change the tires of a race car as it’s going 100mph. As individuals, we’re a mix of software engineering and large-scale systems engineering experts. It takes a group with a diverse collection of expertise to maintain the stability, reliability and performance of Google services while enabling the company’s developers to be agile and to make feature changes every day.

What does your team do?AW: My team is one of the oldest SRE teams at Google. We work on everything involved in web search, from encrypted search to image search. Like most software teams at Google, we also handle emergency alerts when anything goes down for web search. While the systems we work with are complex, we have the benefit of working with Google infrastructure that's highly instrumented and fault tolerant, allowing us a lot of leeway when we need to make behind the scenes changes. If we do our job right, no one should notice any interruptions of service.

What advice can you give aspiring SREs?AW: Learn CS fundamentals and get as much experience as you can. I started early on; in high school I ran my own business doing web design, server administration and writing web apps. When I got to college, I looked for ways outside of class to apply my knowledge. I served as the IT Director at my college radio station, where I kicked servers around and applied the theory I learned in class in the real world. Beyond data structures and algorithms, get a very good applied understanding of the Linux operating system. Work on a server farm running Hadoop, intern with your campus network engineering group, or launch a user-facing service on your favorite public cloud computing environment.

To apply, please visit google.com/students and apply for the Software Engineering opening. After applying, the recruiter will ask which of our Software Engineering roles you are interested in — just indicate your interest in Site Reliability.

With the Google Apps Developer Challenge, we hope developers across the globe will find new and innovative ways to use Apps Script, Apps and Drive APIs to build cool apps. This challenge is particularly unique as the APIs are available to a large community of developers who code in a variety of languages that include Java, PHP, Python, and .Net.

We will be working in collaboration with our Google Developer Groups (also known as GTUGs) and Google Business Groups to organize events and prepare for this challenge. Make sure to join your local community so that you are aware of meet ups.

How familiar are you with the various Google Apps and Drive APIs? If you aren’t familiar, make sure to read up about Google Apps Script, Google Apps and Drive APIs on Google Developers. Use the Chrome Web Store as a source of inspiration. Create an innovative application using Google Apps Script, Google Apps, and Drive APIs. If your application is the best within one of the three categories defined below in your region, you could win a prize of $20,000 dollars! Google is also committed to nurturing the next generation of computer scientists as well as encouraging more women to get into coding, so we have special prizes for all-student or all-female teams that make the second round — $1,000 dollars.

Fans Connect Online, one of the winners of last year’s Android Developer Challenge

The first round of submissions will start on the 24th of August 2012. The categories are

Chukwuemeka is a Program Manager at Google with the Emerging Markets Outreach team where he works closely with developers, startups, businesses and IT professionals in the region to successfully grow their business around Google Developer Tools and APIs. His current mission is to drive developer internet content in Sub Saharan Africa.